Cross my Heart
by Comicbookfan
Summary: Amane Bakura was friends with Seto, once upon a time, before she died. She used to talk to him. Now, when she doesn't want to see her brother, she watches him instead.


**Cross my Heart**

**

* * *

**Amane remembers the first time she saw Seto.

He was just a little boy, about her age--seven. She was taking a walk, alone. Mummy let her walk alone, because Domino, Japan was almost as familiar to her as her native Canterbury because of the vacations they took and the house they owned there. She even knew the language. (Daddy didn't like it, though, but he was away most of the time, and when he was home, mummy would tell him that he wasn't connected enough to his children to make any choices.)

Of course, Ryou hadn't gone along with her. He wasn't much for exercising, because he got tired easy from being sick so much, so he never went along on her walks if she was planning to for a while. He didn't care, though. He was much too busy fixing his dolls.

Amane had heard mummy worrying to daddy about how strange it was that Ryou, the _boy_, was the one who was so obsessed with those pretty porcelain dolls. Daddy had suggested taking them away, give him toy trucks or something to play with. Mummy had scoffed. "Figures you'd give such bad ideas. That would break his heart, that isn't what a parent does!" The way they had bickered so much in mummy's last years was half the reason daddy was so depressed after she died. Because of his guilt at not making her ending time be the best ever.

But, anyway, it was mid-day, just as the sun was getting ready to set. Amane had meant to go to a nice little playground, one much better than the one she was passing, an old, rickety one that the children in the Orphanage played in. But as she walked by that little orphanage, she saw him. It wasn't a magical moment or anything like that, she just felt a pulling curiosity about the other child. He had auburn hair, wore a mustard colored shirt, jeans, and a blue sweater vest. No smile on the pretty, angular face. Just those blue, blue eyes, shooting out laser beams into the dimming light.

What Amane had found really odd was that he wasn't swinging. He was just standing there, holding on tightly to the chain of the swing.

"Hello," Amane had said across the fence.

The boy had looked to her, furrowing his eyebrows, as though not entirely sure she was there. "You are?" He had said in formal, clipped speech that didn't sound seven-year-old at all.

She had climbed over the fence, getting her white dress gray with dust. "I'm Amane Bakura! You?"

Instead of answering her question, he said, "You aren't from around here, are you? Your given name is Amane, right?"

"Right. Sorry. I mean, Bakura Amane. I'm British."

"You speak English?"

"Yes. But tell me your name."

"Given name first, it's Seto Ebina." He spoke this in near-flawless English.

"No way!" Amane squealed. "You speak English? I thought you were Japanese!" She said all this English, following his example.

"I am. My father was American."

"Ooooh...Anyway, why are you out here all alone? Haven't you got any friends to play with?"

He said very seriously, "No. And I'm out here because I'm waiting for my little brother. He's inside." He never quite specified what Mokuba did inside. Probably to do with school, even though at that time he couldn't have been more than four. Amane had guessed that older grades had school in the mornings, and younger grades in the afternoons, no matter what little sense it made.

"Oh, I have a brother too! He's my twin! His name's Ryou. He's not nothing like me, though."

"Mine isn't anything like me either."

"Love him anyway."

"Yes."

"You not using the swing?"

"No."

Seto didn't talk much. Amane could tell he was pretty shy, even though it wasn't obvious. She was good at reading people like that.

She hopped onto the swing. "Do you think you can push me?"

"...Sure."

The next day, Amane came back, properly clad in jeans and a t-shirt. Seto wore the same thing as the day before. The orphanage couldn't afford to give children really more than two pairs of clothes, and keep them washed.

She swung and they talked.

Over the days, Amane would visit him, and when mummy or Ryou asked where she had been, she would say she was visiting the little boy by the swing-set. Until later, she was pretty sure they thought Seto was an imaginary friend.

The day before Amane had to leave for Canterbury again, because she was just a kid and didn't get any say in those things, Amane snuck to the orphanage and Seto snuck out easily from the orphanage, and together they sat and watched the stars. And then they talked every once in a while.

"I want to become something great. I'm not going to lose this, Amane. I can't." Seto had the unsettling habit of thinking of life as a game, a game which was secondary, unimportant to his work, only important when it came to Mokuba. (A child Amane would meet only in death.)

She had looked up at the stars, trying to find those shapes in them, those _constellations _that Ryou told her about, but all she could see was a mass of bright things. "Something great?"

He nodded. "Something really big, really great, really important."

"Oh. I don't know what I wanna be yet, but I guess I wanna be something great too!"

"...Together?"

"Yeah!" The idea seemed fabulously exciting to her.

They stared at the midnight sky for a while, before, as he had strangely been doing all that night, Seto started a new conversation. "Let's correspond."

"What?"

"Write each other." (Just like him, knowing words that she didn't even know in English, which was her native tongue and wasn't his.)

"Ohhh..."

"What's you address in Canterbury?" Being around her so much had added a British lilt to his English, an accent that he still kept later on in his life.

She wrote the address down, handing it to him. "Here."

"Good. Shake on it?"

"Yes! On cor-res-pond-ing!"

So they did. Pale hands wrapped around each other and shook. Then, without warning, Amane threw her arms around Seto's neck, giggling, white hair mixing with short auburn. He didn't hug back, but she knew he was okay with it. She would always remember that, that hug and conversation shared under the stars.

_Together?_

_Yeah!_

It dawns on her now that it was odd that Seto would become her friend, they being such opposites. She supposes he had been lonely, a little desperate, and that was what made him stick with her, that and a little bit of child's innocence that he still had.

Amane wrote to Seto religiously, and he wrote her back. She sometimes sent him random stuff, because she couldn't write as well as he could, not even in English.

In between being with her brother, she would write Seto, and find things to give him. A pressed flower, a doll Ryou had given her, a stone, a fake pearl from a broken necklace. He held most dear a white porcelain circle that she can't remember where she got now. It was smooth, beautiful. _Complete and compact,_ had been his praise for it. He carried it with him everywhere. Still does.

Seto cried when he got the letter telling him about Amane's death, from her brother. Seto never wrote back, and he never did cry much after that.

Sometimes, when Amane gets tired of watching her brother's life going through it's tragic ups and downs, she watches Seto, her best friend once-upon-a-time. Actually, he didn't really get any friends after her. He might still be her best friend.

Because he stopped crying, she cried for him, when he got beaten by the man who adopted him just weeks after her death, she cried when she watched him spiral into dangerous mental instability and depression, she cried out of relief and happiness when things started kind of going right for him, after all of the Egypt weirdness. Another thing that she watched, like a spectator up high in bleachers.

She saw him take out the porcelain disc she had given him, every once in a while, look at it.

After Egypt and even before, he tried even harder to adjust. She watched him toss and turn at night, scream.

She watched him interact with Yuugi and his group, especially, oddly or maybe not so oddly, her brother, and another boy with long black hair and green eyes whose name also started with an R.

Then, at night, she pays silent vigil to him as he sleeps alone, as he wakes up from another exhausting nightmare. when he sits alone on the floor of his room, head in hands. He rarely sleeps more than an hour or two anymore, his waking time being spent consuming coffee.

She watches him, frightened, as he leans out of the window of his big, lonely mansion, as he wills himself to fall, and as he always turns around.

She wraps her arms around her silk shift, looking down on him through long, pale eyelashes. She sighs out.

_Together?_

"...Always."


End file.
